Lois Bujold - The Flowers of Vashnoi

“Hobbles!” Ekaterin cried in excitement.

“What?” said Enrique.

“That pony is wearing hobbles! They’re like, like… binders, restraints people fasten around the front fetlocks—front legs—to let them wander and graze but not go too far, when they don’t have fences. That pony is tame!” Staring at the unkempt, cranky-looking creature, who snorted up suspiciously at the hovering flyer and braced to bolt, Ekaterin corrected this assertion to, “Owned, anyway.” She eased the flyer away so as not to spook the little herd.

If they had been flying any higher or faster, Ekaterin would not have seen it, that faint rectangle in the trees covered with moss, vines, and rocks. “Is that a roof over there?”

Enrique followed her gaze and swung his mass scanner around as she banked the flyer again. As their altitude dropped and the angle changed, the dilapidated gray structure swam into her focus. A shack, a cabin—Ekaterin gulped. I am not superstitious, drat it!

It was not a sinister hut in the forest on chicken legs, it was not … Ekaterin’s heartbeat came off its sudden sprint as the ‘chicken legs’ resolved themselves into an array of dead tree trunks, cut off at about three meters from the ground and supporting the structure like pillars under a platform. The gnarled, dry old roots spread out like talons at the bases of their boles. As false a first impression, if as understandable, as Miles’s wood-elf.

Also, the hut did not lack windows or have a hidden doorway to be invoked only by a virtuous and intelligent girl with the magic words; the wooden door was right there on the end, with a ladder descending from its narrow slice of porch. Good protection from feral dog packs or other ground-based hazards, including the poisonous soil itself, the rational part of Ekaterin’s mind insisted, firmly. All very logical, made perfect sense, and her stomach could just turn itself back right-side-up any time, now…

A faint haze of smoke dispersed from a fieldstone chimney.

“Land, land!” Enrique thumped her shoulder.

“I’m landing!” They scraped through the tree branches that squeaked over the flyer like clawed fingers, then bumped to a halt a dozen meters in front of the strange structure.

Ekaterin stared. Enrique scanned.

“Is there anyone inside?” Ekaterin asked through a dry mouth. Where there was smoke…

“Not right now…” Enrique scrambled over into the back seat and handed up Ekaterin’s protective gear. They each began to don the cumbersome overalls and booties in the cramped confines of the lightflyer. Lab gloves, their hoods-and-masks, and then they both popped out of their respective doors, puffy white ragdoll figures with vaguely insectoid heads, although properly, Ekaterin thought, the round air filters should be set at eye and not cheek level in the half-cylindrical transparent face masks in order to complete the illusion.

At the foot of the shack’s ladder they paused and stared at each other. While happy to defer to Enrique in the areas of his considerable technical expertise, she was, after all, Lady Vorkosigan. This task wasn’t anything she’d ever pictured appending to her new role, but the implication was clear. Ekaterin swallowed, wrapped a gloved hand around a ladder rung, and hoisted herself aloft. Still clutching the scanner, Enrique awkwardly followed.

A string-latch opened the plank door. The hut was a single room, lit only dimly by small, mismatched windows on each side, slate-and-fieldstone hearth at the far end. A few coals glowered out through gray ash. As her eyes adjusted, Ekaterin saw that the walls and floor were crowded by a motley assortment of goods—partly handmade backcountry tools and furniture that might have come straight out of the Time of Isolation, familiar enough from Ekaterin’s trips with Miles up into the mountains, partly what clearly were recent rubbish-tip gleanings.

The rag-stuffed mattress on a wooden cot to one side was held up by a net of woven plastic rope bits. Another rag-stuffed mattress, shoved out of the way underneath like a trundle bed, seemed to have an old print shower curtain for a counterpane. A crudely cobbled-together double bunk on the other side of the room was similarly decked out. Four people live here, then…?

The kitchen goods around the hearth were a like mix—one solid ancient cast-iron frying pan hung on a hook, a very miscellaneous assortment of plastic and metal and formerly electric gadgets repurposed to a powerless—in both senses, perhaps—lifestyle. Impoverished, yet not wholly uncomfortable… Ekaterin was reminded of Miles’s description of his grandfather, the crusty old count whose childhood went back to the time Barrayar had been rediscovered, as a man notably indifferent to indoor plumbing.

Less historically romantic in the winter, to be sure.

But what are they doing for food…? The shelves included ordinary food in modern packaging that could have come from any grocery in Hassadar; home-dried vegetables and herbs hung in strings from the rafters that might have looked quite enticing, except, grown here ? and dried meat likewise alarming; a basket containing a few feather-and-dirt-flecked eggs plainly filched straight from feral chickens.

“Nobody home,” Enrique stated the obvious. His voice, though curious, did not quaver with nerves.

Ekaterin steadied her own. “They’ve not gone far, I’d guess. Let’s take a look around outside.”

The kitchen garden, now she knew to look for one, was not in one big tidy plot visible from the air, but distributed around in small, sunny patches. In a dark, moist, shaded dell hidden among the trees behind the cabin was… what? What looked like yellowish fence posts, but it couldn’t be a garden in that gloom. As she ventured nearer, the posts resolved into a cluster of peeled saplings, with strange pale knobs on top. Oh.

“Now, that’s a touch disturbing,” admitted Enrique, peering over her shoulder. “Or is this another of your local customs?”

“Not… really.”

Skulls on posts. Eleven of them, Ekaterin counted. A twelfth post stood up new and bare. Most of the skulls seemed old and weathered enough to be free of flesh and hair. Ekaterin couldn’t decide if that was reassuring or not. Variously weathered, so different death dates? As she studied them, her stomach knotted at a further observation.

“They’re… small. Mostly. Enrique, I think these are children’s skulls.”

“Unless they are microcephalic people,” he offered. Was that supposed to be helpful …? But really, he didn’t look as if he believed his own alternate hypothesis. “One might tell from the teeth, I believe. I wonder where the bodies are?” He lifted his mass scanner and walked around among the grinning posts, eventually looking downward. “Ah. They seem to be buried by the bases of these poles.”

“Are there very many?”

“Mm, no, they seem to be in a one-to-one ratio with the disjecta membra .”

Not a mass grave, then, though certainly a graveyard. She was no trained forensic pathologist, but she could recognize milk teeth when she saw them, and the meaning of those small jaws. Children; a variety of ages. A couple of the smaller crania were notably misshapen. Her own teeth set. She unhooked her rad scanner from her belt and held it near to test several skulls. It chittered excitedly. The concentration of radiation was well above background, if not quite as intense as some of the hot animal bones found in the zone.

Enrique, who had been circling the plot waving his scanner and squinting into the woods, said, “There’s another structure over there.”

Her gaze tracked his. Even more thoroughly hidden in the vegetation, some plank verticals… an outbuilding? They both started up toward it. It was much smaller than the hut on stilts, though not as small as a privy, and not raised off the ground, though it seemed to sit on a crude fieldstone foundation. Windowless. Doorless…?